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Looking to boost the speed and range of your Wi-Fi network? Then maybe Netgear's new R6300 802.11ac router is what you've been waiting for, as it promises speeds of up to 1300Mbps. That said, Netgear has thrown in a few other features as well, which is a good thing as it's not the cheapest router around.

Looking to boost the speed and range of your Wi-Fi network? Then maybe Netgear's new R6300 802.11ac router is what you've been waiting for, as it promises speeds of up to 1300Mbps. That said, Netgear has thrown in a few other features as well, which is a good thing as it's not the cheapest router around.

802.11ac has several advantages over 802.11n of which speed is the most obvious, but as the standard also supports beamforming the standard is also said to offer improved range due to reduced interference. Throw in some multi-user MIMO where each connected device can receive and independent data stream and you got a pretty good set of features. The downside is a move to the 5GHz band which can be finicky is some countries where few channels are support, especially as 802.11ac uses twice as wide channels at 80MHz compared to a maximum of 40MHz for 802.11n, although 160MHz channels can also be used for faster data transfer speeds.

Netgear's R6300 router sports speeds of up to 1300Mbps over 802.11ac, but it also supports simultaneous 2.4GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi at speeds of up to 450Mbps. This suggests that we're looking at a 3×3 MIMO device due to the high 802.11n speeds, although Netgear doesn't actually mention how many antennas the router has. The router also has five Gigabit Ethernet ports, four for LAN and one for WAN connectivity, two USB 2.0 ports for printer or storage sharing as well as a WPS and a Wi-Fi on/off button.

The only specifications in terms of the hardware inside the router that Netgear has decided to share is that it sports an unspecified Broadcom chip, 128MB of RAM and flash memory, as well as having high-powered radio amplifiers, something usually only found in more expensive routers such as the R6300. On the software side Netgear has added its “Genie” dashboard to make the router easy to use for your average consumers and there's also an app for iOS and Android devices that lets you control the router. The R6300 also supports DLNA and AirPrint as well as being pre-configured with Wi-Fi encryption.

Netgear is recommending that the R6300 should be used with 3×3 450Mbps MIMO Wi-Fi adapters on the 2.4GHz band, or 3×3 802.11ac MIMO adapters, although for some reason Netgear doesn't actually offer a compatible 802.11ac adapter to go with the R6300 which is a bit odd. Price wise the R6300 is actually quite competitive at US$199.99 (S$249) when it arrives in May, which compares to high-end simultaneous dual-band 802.11n routers, so at least the good news is that the extra speed won't cost you a lot more on the router side of things.